Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: California State University, Northridge

Title of entry: Heritage Month Social Media Series

About this entry: CSUN’s Heritage Month social media series is a year-long project in which we talk to and profile students during nationally recognized months about the importance of personal identity and or cultural identity. Given how identity is individual and nuanced, we make it a point to showcase how each student uniquely identifies with their cultural identity.

The series came to life after the social media student assistant, Habeba Mostafa, yearned for more student and diverse representation on the official social media accounts, particularly Instagram. The Strategic Communication and Brand Management department supported her in bringing her vision to life, ultimately increasing engagement and student representation across the @CSUN_edu Instagram account.

The process of executing this series involved collaboration with current undergraduate students, graduate students, fraternity members and those in student organizations who continue to embody and provide growth to our large campus community. Each interviewee was asked a series of questions, including how they identify themselves with a template of “I am”: a noun or adjective would be selected for each student, and this would later be the word chosen to have written directly on the photo displayed. For aesthetic purposes, the descriptive word was often correlated with a colored element on the image.